


I, Moran: Untold Tales from Conduit Street

by AleineSkyfire



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Crimes & Criminals, Friendship, Gen, Serial Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-10 08:10:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4384037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AleineSkyfire/pseuds/AleineSkyfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Most officers had more than one indiscretion which they'd prefer to keep quiet; it was purely bad luck on my part that I was caught out on one or two of my own." Colonel, hunter, criminal, killer—this is the story of Sebastian Moran, the second most dangerous man in London and the bosom friend of criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty. Character-based serial fic, cross-posted on FFN and Tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which Introductions Are Made

Let’s not waste any time, shall we? Just the basic facts of my past, eh, and then we can get down to the reason why you are reading this. Dr. Watson has not deigned to mention either myself or my employer as of yet in his stories; he went so far as to painstakingly exorcise us entirely from the affair of Irene Adler and the so-called “King of Bohemia” in his published account. “A Scandal in Bohemia”—good fun all around, and scarcely a word of it true. The good Doctor certainly possesses a flair for fiction.

But I cannot trust that this aforementioned leniency will continue forever, and when the time comes that he writes up the events of the spring of 1891, another written record will be needed to set things straight. You can be sure that he won’t depict either the Professor or myself in a favourable light.

My name is Sebastian Moran, Colonel, late of Her Majesty’s Indian Army, the 1st Bangalore Pioneers specifically. Born in good old London, raised for a time in India, son of the British Minister to India. It may have been a place to build character, but it was no place to make a proper God-fearing British gentleman out of one’s heir, so off I was packed to Eton and then Oxford.

That much is a matter of record, and what you, my fine, upstanding audience are here for is the sordid tale of my unlawful exploits with my unlawful friend and employer, Professor James Moriarty.

Well, as it turns out, our first meeting was quite incongruous. You see, there wasn’t much love lost between myself and good old Sir Augustus, the model of British decency and decorum, an example to his fellow countrymen in India. Behind closed doors, however, he was the most hateful man I have ever had the misfortune of knowing—and that includes all manner of thieves, murderers, and assorted ne’er-do-wells whom I’ve known both in the service of my Queen and in the service of my old tutor. The old man wished for me to follow in his footsteps, but I dodged him. Made a mess of my time in Oxford—despite my not-inconsiderable intelligence, I will have you know—and joined the army. Fortunately, I had one or two friends in high places who were sympathetic to my plight, and I had a commission awaiting me. But Her Majesty’s army wants their officers to be intelligent and well-educated, and my grades in Oxford were not up to par.

Moriarty was my maths tutor. He was the classic teacher-and-mentor: a sympathetic ear, words of wisdom, unflagging patience. All he wanted was a venerable age—he was only in his thirties at the time. But a better friend I could not ask for, and indeed had never known. He got me through maths, and I daresay that I taught him a few tricks at cards that he had not previously known.

We kept up a correspondence for the next decade or so while I was off in India and Afghanistan, fighting the good fight and furthering the cause of Queen and country. Patriotic of me, eh? Well, I suppose I wouldn’t sell out my people for any price, but there was, of course, more to it than that. As it turned out, I was a natural good shot—the best heavy game shot in India, matter of fact—and I had a taste for battle. Some called me a hero, and I suppose I was, from a purely British point of view. Kept more of our men alive than the rest of the officers around me put together, but for all that, I was never a general. Oh, it might have come to me had I not been quite so… dissolute.

Most officers had more than one indiscretion which they’d prefer to keep quiet; it was purely bad luck on my part that I was caught out on one or two of my own. Card-sharping, a nicked Indian idol here and there, a superior officer’s daughter in a discreet, torrid romance with the irresistibly dashing Colonel Moran. Too many dalliances with the native women, perhaps? I had the interesting experience of coming across a dark-skinned Indian boy with blue Moran eyes staring out of his thin face. Nothing like meeting your own unknown progeny to make you reflect on the course your life has taken; it’s not, after all, as though Sebastian Moran is some uncouth, unintelligent scoundrel.

But I digress. I retired at the ripe old age of forty before they could saddle me with a dishonourable discharge, and returned to London.

James Moriarty was waiting for me with open arms. I don’t think he had anything to do with my forced retirement, though I’ve seen him pull similar tricks with other men whose talents and services he wishes to acquire. No, my bad luck was just that, not engineered by the man I am privileged to call “friend”.

The Professor made a full confession of his true livelihood and morals, and then offered to hire my services as his lieutenant. I would be well-paid and well-looked after for a mere handful of high-class jobs in the London Underworld. How could I refuse such a generous offer? True that, having revealed so much to me, I could not have left the Professor’s study alive unless it were as his employee, but I wanted to follow him.

Anyone who has met James Moriarty will understand. He is compelling and forceful, charismatic and dangerous, the epitome of a leader for whom men would risk life and limb. Even the bloody Great Detective cannot help but admire him—his own words, I heard them myself.

“Will you join me in my work, old friend?”

“Sir, it would be my honour.”

The deal was made, the contract signed, and my fate became irrevocably bound up in his. Dr. John Watson will be known to posterity for the company he kept; so, too, shall I.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MISS ME?
> 
> Oh my gosh, hi, everybody! Yes, I still live—incredible, right? What’s even more incredible is that I’m starting to write my own fic again, hallelujah! I haven’t really stopped writing in the three years since I finished Mortality, but it’s mostly been work on my co-written Wholock crossover Children of Time. I probably have my co-writer and best friend Riandra to thank for keeping me writing!
> 
> So, recently, I have had a terrible obsession with Moriarty and Moran. It doesn’t help that there are only a handful of adaptations in which they share screentime (Granada, I’m forever bitter at you for neglecting this), and even written pastiches including both are easily numbered. I’m not a huge fan of the Warner Bro films, but I even rewatched Game of Shadows just for the Moriarty/Moran interaction. So much vastly unmined potential that it’s maddening!
> 
> So, I’m taking steps to cure my own fever, or at least make it bearable! I don’t know how few and far-between updates will be, because I have nothing more, as of yet, than this hastily-written prologue. But I want to do more. I need to do more. I’m getting back into writing Sherlock Holmes proper again, and I need to flesh out my villains. Yes, this story will be taking place in the Deliver Us from Evil universe—a rather revamped one. Revamped how? Well, you’ll just have to stick around and see. ;)
> 
> Please review!


	2. In which the Professor’s history is expanded upon

It occurs to me that, before I go further, I should give you a good sketch of Professor Moriarty. As I said before, Dr. Watson is hardly likely to be flattering when he does write us up, and a balanced perspective is good for the soul, eh? In any case, the good Professor is one of the greatest geniuses in England in an era that’s up to its ears in genius. Only decent that his history be made known to a public that otherwise remains fairly ignorant of him.

James Richard Paul Moriarty, M.A., was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1829; by a curious coincidence, the same year that the London Peelers were founded. His father, Sir James Moriarty III, was Anglo-Irish; his mother, Catriona, was pure Irish. I’ve said before that I have never known a more hateful man than my own father, Sir Augustus; it is entirely possible that would not be true had I met Sir James. The old sot beat his wife and firstborn with fists as well as words, and the way in which he treated the young James Richard was particularly cruel. The boy was sickly in his youth, so much so that he nearly died several times before the age of ten. When poor Catriona bore her husband a second and more robust son, Sir James named the newcomer after him as well, wanting a sturdier heir.

James Robert, or the new James Moriarty IV, grew to be a boy every bit as vain and cruel as his father. James Richard was simply called  Richard by his father and brother when named at all; more often, he endured more insulting epithets from both, too frail and thin and  womanly for their tastes. But James Richard was a prodigy, naturally, and escaped to Eton. One knows that one’s childhood is tragic when moving to Eton means a better life!

While there, James quickly learnt to change his accent to that of the upper-class Londoner he’d heard all his life. He excelled in his studies, surpassed all his teachers, and finished Eton before his thirteenth birthday. He proceeded to Oxford, where he entered, despite his extreme youth, on the strength of astonishing everyone involved with his entrance with his brilliance. The boy finished his Master of Arts at the age of twenty. Old Dickens himself could not have written a more stirring narrative of triumph over one’s circumstances.

Except that tragedy struck, in the form of his father beating his wife to death in a drunken fit. James Richard nearly killed his father right then and there, but held his peace long enough to be disinherited completely. His first crime was to arrange the murder of his father, literally getting the last and well-deserved laugh.

His brother, he was hardly to see again for decades, although I did out in India. James Robert became an officer in Her Majesty’s Indian Army, and one of the most corrupt officers I have ever had the displeasure of knowing. And, believe you me, I do not say that lightly. The last I heard, he too had been caught out on scandalous grounds, retired, and returned to England; only he took up station-mastering, of all things, in Devon, of all places.

Heaven knows I shall never be able to understand the men of that family.

But to return to James Moriarty, M.A., he published a treatise on the binomial theorem at the age of twenty-one. I’ve read it. Not a bad piece of work, but pretty heavy going. Then again, the Professor has said the same of my own books. Our minds are very clearly worlds apart, and the Professor does no better in the wilds of India than I do in the midst of a lecture hall.

But to return to my story, Oxford offered him a chair as a maths professor, following the success of that little pamphlet. Moriarty gladly accepted it. Numbers are his passion, and logic his lady love—and, truth to tell, I’ve never seen a man better suited to teaching. He has both an aptitude and a love for it. Some might suppose that a man who runs a criminal empire on the strictest rules of punishment for failure would be a hard man in the classroom, but not so. He is patient and, dare I say, even kind to his students, almost to a fault. Makes one wonder what might have happened had things in his life gone a bit differently.

His career in crime began as an intellectual exercise, born of the boredom of a particularly slow and sultry summer week, as well as a distinct contempt for the fledgling police force. He believed that he could outwit them so thoroughly that they would never have a prayer of finding their way back to him, and history would go on to affirm his youthful arrogance. He committed his first crime, a jewelry theft, with every intention of returning the stolen items; which he did, accomplishing the entire thing through agents and with the utmost precision.

He began to test his limits, and soon discovered that he was limited only by resources, material and human. But he was young and naive, an idealist who had not yet been crushed by the world, and he was disturbed at how easily he took to lawbreaking. He stopped, and focused on his legitimate career.

Unfortunately for law-abiding citizens and fortunately for the criminal classes, the world did rise up to crush him. Professional jealousy was the murder weapon. Moriarty was one of the youngest professors at the time, as well as something of a radical and reformist, and an Irishman to boot. Many of his colleagues grew to actively dislike him, particularly when he opposed common views that he found irrational and unprofessional.

In a heated argument with a drunken older professor, Moriarty was struck in the presence of witnesses, all of whom testified that he had struck his elder—when, in fact, he had only shoved the man’s arm back when he moved in for a second strike.

Rumours spread, and the threat of scandal grew. Like-minded peers—of course, he had  some ; no man is  that unpopular to have none—attempted to defend the young professor, but to no avail. His own mentor, a man whom he had come to see in a fatherly light, advised him to resign and salvage what he could of his career, as his enemies were too many and too powerful.

It was purely by coincidence that a bullet ended up buried in that man’s head. Certainly it was. The police concluded it was suicide because the man held a gun in his frozen hand, never mind that the gun clearly hadn't been fired and the bullet in his head was not the same as those in the gun.  


But I digress. The Professor would tell me little of that time, but what he didn’t say told me as much as what he did. He acceded the game, feeling more abandoned and betrayed than perhaps he ever had, and returned to London, bitter and jaded. The idealist had died, and in his place rose the criminal mastermind. But he still held a legitimate job, setting up shop as an army coach, which was how I met him.

In private, he entered the employ of several major London criminals as a consultant. One by one, he supplanted them, and killed, absorbed, and made alliances or treaties with the entire London Underworld. Within five years, he’d developed the largest conglomerate of criminals Underworld had ever seen.

By the age of thirty-five, James Moriarty had become one of the most powerful men in London, reigning over more than half of the criminals in the city and directly influencing the rest. It was then that he turned his attention to those of more privileged birth, seeking to control more and more of the London population at a time when London ruled a vast portion of the world. He extended influence over politicians and army officials, and even over the police forces of the Met and the City themselves. The Scotland Yard scandals of the ‘70s were a heavy blow to him, one from which his empire never fully recovered—the only element which allowed the Great Meddler to damage things in ‘91.

No doubt you now picture a power-mad maniac, reminiscent of good old Napoleon and his insatiable need to rein over all of Europe. Well, far be it from me to deny that the Professor does indeed enjoy power—I was an officer in the army, I know the signs—but there is still much more to him than that. He’s an avowed misanthrope and no mistake, but he remains a man of logic, and he sees little sense in most of the social and political norms of our era. “The world could be a much better place, and it is hardly even  trying ,” he once snarled over a morning paper filled with news of disaster and mayhem.

He renewed an active attention towards reform in various circles. In theory, he would not even be adverse to reforms in law and law enforcement if they would only work and truly benefit society. Though, as I said, the police scandals hurt the organisation—our organisation. Nevertheless, I’ve personally witnessed him donate large sums of money to specific charities that had been proven to do what they were supposed to do. (I’ve also witnessed him set up dummy charities for various purposes, such as the Red-headed League, but those are stories for another time.)

In the ‘70s, merely in his forties and in command of the British Empire’s largest crime syndicate, Moriarty took up university teaching again, this time at Cambridge. (A very nice snub it was, too, to his  alma mater , and one that I’m sure Cambridge crowed over. “We have the mathematical genius you threw out, ha!”) It was there that he and Sherlock Holmes first met. The fact of it is that Moriarty took young Holmes under his wing, and then showed him his true colours… rather less gently than he did to me. The boy was scared off, and all the Professor’s attempts to mend the relationship ended up creating not a tighter bond but his very own worst enemy. 

I’ve met the man myself, when he was still a boy. I should have gone for the brat’s throat when I had the chance. But my own cursed sentimental streak prevented such a thought from even occurring to me at the time, particularly when he reminded me so strongly of the Professor himself. Physically, they almost might have been father and son, with similar build, height, facial structure, and grey eyes. Their histories, too, were not dissimilar, nor was their youthful idealism.

Sherlock Holmes, too, was crushed, and like the Professor, he rose again—but not to crime. To  solving crime. To  punishing it. Not long after Holmes took up work as a private detective—disgraceful, that, by the by: the boy was a gentleman, the son of a country squire—Moriarty quit his chair at Cambridge, deciding to take up independent lecturing and concentrate more fully once again on his illegitimate career. Not long after that, I returned to England, which brings us back to where we were previously.

With my pension and the advanced pay Moriarty had given me, I settled into a small but respectable house on Conduit Street. I had more room than I knew what to do with—travelling often in the army for the entirety of my adult life, I had few possessions, mostly guns and a wardrobe only just big enough to allow me to move comfortably in higher circles. The tigers I’d had skinned and preserved or stuffed, I had always been forced to donate to clubs in which I had membership. No one wants to carry a male Bengal tiger through the wilds of Afghanistan.

The Professor paid me a visit within a few hours of the move; within two, I had already arranged the place to my liking. “A bit spare,” said he, casting a critical eye over empty shelves and walls bearing nothing but paper, “but that is only to be expected, all things considered. Do you like it?”

“I’d hardly be here if I didn’t, sir,” I smirked around a cigar. I gestured for him to take one of the armchairs by the fire, while I took the other. “The location is certainly right, and the cost was decent for the location. The place is, as you say, spare, but I’ve a few notions of how to fill the empty spaces.”

“Good, good.” The man nodded as if in fatherly approval. Perhaps it was. James Moriarty is hardly what one would call a  marrying man , but he does possess a certain amount of paternal affection—drawn, I think, to others who were denied that love as he himself had been.

“Professor, may I ask you a question regarding the history of the Firm?” Moriarty had a handful of names for his business: the Family (a tradition, to call a criminal organisation a  family ), the Empire (rarely, always with pride, never leaving any doubt as to  which Empire he referred), and the Firm (the most commonly-used, particularly for use in public).

Moriarty leaned back in his chair, crossed his ankles, and steepled his fingers. “By all means.”

“I can hardly have been the first lieutenant you have had; you would have needed one long before now, and I don’t believe you would let yourself do without. What became of my predecessor?”

I had not expected the mixture of emotions that passed over the man’s lined face. I fancied I saw sadness, or perhaps regret, and certainly anger, and other emotions I could not begin to guess at. He took a drag of the cigarette I had given him earlier and turned his gaze to the fire. He looked older than his fifty years, as if burdened by some secret he bore. At length, he spoke, quietly, and not looking up.

“Your predecessor was a member of one of the smaller fraternities I gathered into the Firm in the early days. A good organiser, a sharp intellect, and under-utilised in his current sphere as an junior clerk, both legally and illegally. I saw his talent, his potential, his mind. I promoted him. He served me well for years.”

I frowned, suddenly uneasy as to the direction this story would take.

“Our line of work is never a safe one, Moran, from within as well as without. Ambition is a greater enemy than the police. Always, someone seeks to better his position, replace those above him. I myself overthrew all my superiors and rose above them to a place they could never have reached, an authority over numerous families, great and small. An emperor, if you will. It is the way of the criminal classes.'

 

“My lieutenant was ambitious. We worked well together, but we were never friends. I did not think that he would be content forever to stand within my shadow, and I would not have held it against him had he merely attempted to harm myself in his gamble for power.”

My frown deepened. “His gamble harmed others?”

Moriarty’s dark grey eyes flickered up at me for a moment before returning to watch the flames. There was indeed anger in those depths, but also sadness. “Colonel, what is the punishment for desertion in the army?”

“Death.”

“Why?”

I recalled one boy from my regiment who had deserted and then been found. He should never have enlisted; I’d known that from the moment I first laid eyes on him. Too sensitive a soul for the business of killing and watching your comrades be killed around you. With eyes as wide and wild as a spooked horse, he’d pleaded for mercy—he only wanted to go home to his mother, him her only son.

He was sentenced to death by firing squad. Necessary though I knew it was, I hadn’t able to watch. The army was no place for boys.  
  


“Because it’s treason. Because an army runs on trust, on morale—an army with low spirits is no good. Desertion breaks faith with the men, betrays the ones who stay behind and fight on.”

“Just so. Your predecessor did not simply betray me; he also betrayed the very men to whom he had a responsibility. He began to slip coded messages to the police, tips as to where and how to catch our men in the act. Panic flooded the lower ranks; we very nearly dissolved into chaos. The man grew bolder; he pointed attention towards the police itself, indirectly instigating the scandal of the previous decade. With the Firm in disarray and my power to lead and protect discredited, he made one final move with his messages. He confessed to his crimes, and made a bargain to escape a trial in return for a few weeks of protection in jail and the name and location of his employer. Once I was in the custody of the police, I have no doubt he would have returned to the Firm and cast all suspicion upon me, possibly as seeking to weed out the least efficient members of the organisation to make it stronger. It had the potential to be a credible story.

“I could not kill him. Such a murder would only excite the official force into a frenzy to find those responsible and bring them to justice. My organisation was at its lowest point; I could not guarantee that they would not find me out and dissolve the Firm altogether.”

My frown deepened. “Surely you could not talk reason into him? Or bribe him? It sounds as though he wanted to destroy you.”

“He did. I took no pleasure in my solution to the dilemma, but it had to be done. There are a few chemists under the employ of the Firm. One in particular, a woman who passes herself off as a man in order to pursue her passions, can do wonders with drugs. I had his maid drug his evening brandy, and when the detectives arrived in the morning, they found only a gibbering madman, driven to insanity by the horrors he had witnessed throughout the night.”

I shivered at the thought, reminded uncomfortably of how dangerous the man sitting across from me was. Infinitely more dangerous than I; such a scheme would never have occurred to me.

“I did not enjoy it,” he repeated softly. “But my very life was at stake, and there was a heavy price that demanded to be paid for all the men and women he had betrayed. He broke faith with them, Moran.”

I understood. Moriarty knows how to make a person understand his point, how to speak in their language so that they cannot fail to do so. I had the irreverent thought that it was just as well that I was hardly an ambitious man: I had no desire to rule an empire; I simply wished to work and also to have enough time to pursue my vices. I’ve never claimed to be a complicated fellow.

“It may sound inane, Professor, but you should know that I do not intend to fail or betray you.”

The ghost of a smile flitted across his lips. “I know you do not, Moran. I should not have taken you into my employ or my confidence if I thought you did.”

Ah, trust. The wheels which move the world. It does one good to be trusted, even if by only one person in the whole of humanity.

It was then that I realised that I had never known a better man than the Professor, and have not since. He possesses no illusions about his own morality or lack thereof, and yet he probably does more good than your average “decent” citizen, as I have witnessed personally. He may not be an angel, but neither is he the Devil. He is not a good man, but he is a great one.

And now more than ever, I looked forward to working with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, an update! Sorry for the wait, but this chapter gave me a hard time. The second half refused to be written!


End file.
